Baby strollers are a good invention and work just fine, but strollers aren’t all things to all surfaces. From first hand experience, they do very poorly on water.
A married co-worker couple with their little girl and I were traveling from one village to another in a downriver direction. They were in their faster boat and I was driving the traditional dugout powered by an outboard. My rig was much slower but my co-workers stayed with me because we had several big rapids to portage over, through and around. We needed each other’s help. Having successfully pulled and motored our way down through all the rapids my co-workers sped on ahead. To give them more room we had loaded their baby stroller onto my boat. They’d arrive at the next village around noon and I pull in several hours later. It was to be a very uneventful ride. Of course you had to look out for sand bars, rocks and snags but that was just routine, no big deal.
Sitting there at the back of the dugout, left hand on the steering tiller of the outboard, the engine droning on with the sun beating down, it was hard to keep awake. By and by I felt the call of nature and started searching the passing river banks for a good place to pull the dugout into. Seeing a spot where the bank wasn’t too steep I pulled in, made my way to the front of the boat, picked up the chain, jumped onto the bank, tied the chain to the nearest tree and made my way into the jungle. After a few minutes I was ready to continue on downriver and was approaching the tree to untie the boat when I noticed a very big bushmaster snake coiled at the base of the tree with head raised and pointed in my direction. One of the important things you learn about the jungle is that you don’t mess with bushmasters. Too many friends have died or lost a foot or lower leg to these poisonous reptiles. The first thing I did was thank the Lord for His protection. I hadn’t even noticed the snake when I had tied the boat. It was now exacting revenge for being disturbed by laying claim to my dugout. I say that because I couldn’t even get to the boat let alone untie it. In all the years of living in the jungle I’d never had a snake steal anything from me. I wanted my dugout back and came up with a plan.
I got into the water downstream from the flickering tongue, swam out to the stern of the boat and clambered in over the side. Once back in the boat it was a simple matter to find an implement with which to dispatch the bushmaster. There is a lot of meat on a six foot snake so I laid it down in the boat with the evening meal in mind. I untied the boat and shoved off into the current.
Well the current was strong and pushed us, that is the snake and me into the brush where a branch reached out and cleanly flipped the baby stroller into the water where it immediately sank. My first reaction was to think, “I can’t loose this stroller”. There was no place within hundreds of river miles and days of travel where you could get another one. I quickly tied the boat back up and started getting things into perspective. First a bushmaster had tried to steal my boat and now the river was intent on stealing the baby stroller. Getting the boat back hadn’t been too difficult but the stroller was another matter. No matter how hard I tried to think of an alternative I knew the only way to get the stroller back was to dive for it. This was not a happy thought because the current was swift, the location of the stroller wasn’t known and you couldn’t see anything on the river bottom. This was also anaconda country and one of those really big snakes could be anywhere.
I stuck one end of a long pole into the mud at the river bottom and lashed the other end to my boat. Not feeling at all good about what I was doing I got into the water for the second time in less than an hour and began pushing myself, hand under hand to the bottom. To tell the truth I was scared. There were no other human beings for miles in any direction and what I was doing wasn’t safe for any number of reasons. I had a knife in my teeth and once on the bottom I pushed myself 360 degrees around the pole while reaching out with the other hand hoping to find the stroller. No stroller, so back up to the surface to breath and reposition for another try. This time, once on the bottom I wrapped my feet around the pole and extended my whole body outwards and praise the Lord this time my hand felt the stroller. Back up the pole I went and heaved myself and the stroller into the dugout. Meanwhile I’d forgotten about the bushmaster lying there in the bottom of the boat. Well, forgotten or not, it was very much there and I landed right on top of it. Somehow the sensation of landing on that snake combined with the thoughts of anacondas and whatever else was down there all came together and gave me the scare of my life. I literally almost jumped back into the river.
Well, after my heart calmed down I continued on down river, stroller safe on board. I had meat for the evening meal (bushmaster) and the rest of the trip was back to “uneventful like it was supposed to have been in the first place.
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